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MITEI 2014 Seed Fund Awards Announced

March 27, 2014

The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has announced its latest round of seed grants to support early-stage innovative energy projects. A total of more than $1.6 million was awarded to 11 projects, each lasting up to two years. With this latest round, the MITEI Seed Fund Program has supported 129 early-stage research proposals, with total funding of about $15.8 million.

Among the winners is Prof. Niels Holten-Andersen for his project

Hybrid metal-organic materials for sustainability

Much attention is focused on the development of crystalline and amorphous network materials for gas storage. Assistant professor Niels Holten-Andersen of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and assistant professor Jeremiah Johnson of the Department of Chemistry are working to combine metallosupramolecular assembly with polymer networks to create a new class of hybrid metal-organic materials. These novel materials will unite the well-controlled physical properties of polymers with the promising functional properties of metal-facilitated self-assembly. The materials will be versatile, robust, and capable of self-healing and “tunable” self-assembly. They can thus be optimized for applications such as carbon capture, wastewater filtration, and natural gas storage, and for use in devices including fuel cells, rechargeable batteries, and solar cells.